Vincentian Encyclopedia:Copyrights
The license Vincentian Encyclopedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as "copyleft", which means that Vincentian Encyclopedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Vincentian Encyclopedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Vincentian Encyclopedia articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.
To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in Vincentian Encyclopedia is copyrighted (automatically under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works by Vincentian Encyclopedia contributors and licensed to the public under the "GNU Free Documentation License"' (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License. This text must not be changed.
The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.
IMPORTANT: If you want to reuse content from Vincentian Encyclopedia, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section.
Contributors' rights and obligations
If you contribute material to Vincentian Encyclopedia, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
- you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
- you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.
In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can *never* retract the GFDL license for the copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain.
In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.
Using copyrighted work from others
All works are copyrighted unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under fair use, or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Vincentian Encyclopedia's content as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use. See Wikipedia's policy on "fair use" of content.
- Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others.* This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the Vincentian Encyclopedia project. If in doubt, write it yourself.
Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Vincentian Encyclopedia. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.
Linking to copyrighted works
Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Vincentian Encyclopedia article which cites its sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material, just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in a bibliography. Likewise, Vincentian Encyclopedia is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.
However, if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (ntellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on Vincentian Encyclopedia and its editors.
Copyright violations
Contributors who repeatedly post copyrighted material despite appropriate warnings may be blocked from editing by any Vincentian Encyclopedia administrator to prevent further problems.
If you suspect a copyright violation, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's discussion page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from Vincentian Encyclopedia in the first place is not a copyright violation – at least not on Vincentian Encyclopedia's part.
If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – should be removed.
Image guidelines
Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used.
Reusers' rights and obligations
If you want to use Vincentian Encyclopedia materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the Vincentian Encyclopedia article, you must follow GFDL policy on verbatim copying.
If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:
- your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
- you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
- you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a Vincentian Encyclopedia article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)
Fair use materials and special requirements
All original Vincentian Encyclopedia text is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License|GFDL. Vincentian Encyclopedia articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine in accordance with our policies. We prefer that these be obtained under the most free content license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain). In cases where no such media files such as illustrations or sounds are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances.
In Vincentian Encyclopedia, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of Vincentian Encyclopedia, of such "fair use" content retrieved from Vincentian Encyclopedia: this "fair use" content does not fall under the GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.
Vincentian Encyclopedia uses some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Vincentian Encyclopedia text.
If you are the owner of Vincentian Encyclopedia-hosted content being used without your permission
If you are the owner of content that is being used on Vincentian Encyclopedia without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Vincentian Encyclopedia; see Request for immediate removal of copyright violation. You can also contact our Vincentian Encyclopedia Administrators to have it permanently removed (but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way). You may also blank the page and replace it with the words {{copyvio|URL or place you published the text}} but the text will still be in the page history. Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.
- This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Wikipedia Copyright Article".
